Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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House Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s “YouCut” project has released a new video that attempts to visually underscore the impropriety of sticking future taxpayers with a mountain of federal debt.

The video begins with a voice saying “You wouldn’t do this to your child’s piggy bank” followed by visuals of a child’s piggy bank being smashed with a hammer. The voice then says:

But Democrat controlled Washington is leaving a $13 trillion debt for your children and future generations. It’s time Washington got its fiscal house in order. Start changing the culture of spending in Washington by voting on YouCut today.

That’s a wee bit disingenuous considering that Republicans and Democrats alike are responsible for the massive federal debt.

More frustrating is the fact that the GOP leadership rhetoric of grave concern is completely at odds with the party’s tiny proposed reforms. In Cantor’s YouCut commentary he says “America is at a critical crossroads, and the choices we make today will determine the kind of country we leave to our children and grandchildren.”

1. Terminate Taxpayer Funding of National Public Radio. The site says this would achieve “Savings of Tens of Millions of Dollars (potentially in excess of a hundred million dollars).” NPR shouldn’t receive taxpayer funding – and not just because it canned Juan Williams. But couldn’t the House GOP leadership have at least offered up the $500 million Corporation for Public Broadcasting that subsidizes NPR for cutting?

2. Terminate Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program. The site says this would save $87.5 million over ten years.

3. Terminate the Presidential Election Fund. This would achieve a whopping projected savings of $520 million over ten years.

America is at a “critical crossroads” and the GOP leadership is offering to cut whaling history subsidies? Congress is bankrupting the nation and the possible next Speaker of the House – “never a details man” – can’t even specify what he would cut in the budget.

In a previous post, I promised to address the negative spin that the Kaiser Family Foundation put on its annual Employer Health Benefits Survey, released this month. I do so in an op-ed that ran today at the Daily Caller. An excerpt:

The advocacy group Health Care for America Now was the first to bring the action to widespread attention. “Even for the insurance industry this behavior is surprisingly brazen,” HCAN Executive Director Ethan Rome wrote in a blog entry for the Huffington Post. “They don’t like the rules, so they’re going to take their ball and go home.”

But the insurance industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans rejected HCAN’s contention that the companies’ refusal to sell to all comers is somehow a violation of a promise made earlier this year by AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni that insurance companies would comply with regulations regarding children and pre-existing conditions.

In an interview, AHIP spokesman Robert Zirkelbach said Ignagni was responding only to promises that children wouldn’t be excluded from their parents’ plans and that if the kids are covered, the policies would include treatment of their pre-existing condition.

What emerged in the regulations, however, Zirkelbach said, was, in effect, a requirement that insurance companies accept children even if they are already sick. That, he said, would be tantamount to exactly what companies want to avoid with the adult population — letting people wait until they are sick to sign up for insurance. Which is exactly why the insurance industry is so insistent on a coverage mandate: It needs premiums of healthy people to help cover the costs of those who are not.

In effect, ObamaCare supporters said to the public, “Give the government more power over insurance companies and the government will make health insurance more accessible and secure.” These few paragraphs capture how that strategy has turned into a cat-and-mouse game with insurers, and is turning ObamaCare’s most attractive selling point – guaranteed coverage for kids with pre-existing conditions – into an empty promise.

In stark contrast stands the individual insurance market. Yes, insurers there generally (but not always) charge premiums that correspond to risk, and sometimes turn people down – but that market has also been remarkably innovative when it comes to protecting sick people from higher premiums. RAND Health economist Susan Marquis and her colleagues write, “a large number of people with health problems do obtain coverage” in the individual market: “Our analysis confirms earlier studies’ findings that there is considerable risk pooling in the individual market and that high risks are not charged premiums that fully reflect their higher risk.” Even as Congress debated ObamaCare, UnitedHealthcare introduced an innovative new product that protects people with employer-sponsored coverage from facing sky-high premiums when they leave their company plan. Economist John Cochrane predicts that further innovations can make health insurance more secure and improve the quality of medical care.

Which process seems more likely to improve quality and reduce costs? The political process, where politicians and regulators try to force insurance companies to act against their financial self-interest? Or the market process, where self-interest forces insurers to find innovative ways to give consumers more of what they want?

I grow increasingly amused at how some people carefully avoid saying that ObamaCare is unpopular.

When Pollster.com aggregates all the various polls on ObamaCare’s popularity, it reveals that a plurality or majority of the public has consistently opposed the law since before the angry town-hall meetings of August 2009:

It’s no surprise when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius avoids the U-word by saying stuff like, “We have a lot of reeducation to do.” (To be clear, she’s talking about reeducating you, not herself.)

But it’s odd when a Washington Postnews item describes the public as “profoundly ambivalent” toward the law. (According to Merriam-Webster, ambivalence means holding “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings,” “continual fluctuation,” or “uncertainty as to which approach to follow.”) Or when Kaiser Family Foundation president and CEO Drew Altman tells NPR: “The public is split, has been split, and continues to be split.”

I guess those descriptions are true (though “continual fluctuation” and “uncertainty” seem like a stretch). But they’re not very informative. “Ambivalent” doesn’t tell you if one side dominates. “Split” could accurately describe anything shy of unanimity. “Opposed” or “unpopular” or “consensus” would convey so much more information. Why convey less?

I was a bit critical of Laura Tyson’s New York Times article on “Why We Need a Second Stimulus.” Apparently I wasn’t nearly critical enough.

The Nation and National Public Radio are advising President Obama to “stop listening to infrastructure-phobic advisers like Larry Summers and start taking counsel from Laura Tyson, a member of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board who argues that $1 trillion in infrastructure investment is needed over the next five years.”

At The Atlantic, senior editor (and Boston Globe columnist) Joshua Green thinks Laura Tyson’s article “underscored what a loss it is for the Obama administration that it couldn’t manage to find a place for her on its economic team.” Mr. Green can’t imagine why a Berkeley professor who wants to add an extra trillion to federal spending wouldn’t be the ideal budget director.

In the article that so impressed Mr. Green, Tyson wrote, “The primary cause of the [current] labor market crisis is a collapse in private demand… By late 2009, in response to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, household and business spending began to recover. But by the second quarter of this year, economic growth had slowed to 1.6 percent.”

Combining “fiscal and monetary stimulus” in a single phrase is a clumsy way to conceal the irrelevance of “fiscal stimulus” (debt-financed federal spending) to GDP growth in 2009. Fiscal stimulus means the Treasury sells more bonds. Monetary stimulus means the Fed buys more bonds. To discuss those transactions as if they had the same effect is just another mysterious Keynesian incantation.

Tyson claims there is “too little appreciation for how stimulus spending has helped stabilize the economy and how more of the right kind of government spending could boost job creation and economic growth.” She wants much more spending on unemployment benefits (a paradoxical definition of a jobs program) and on aid to state and local governments (where unemployment rates are relatively low).

To argue for more borrowing and spending, however, Tyson cannot credit monetary policy for helping the recovery. Because she explicitly advocates much more spending on “unemployment benefits and aid to state governments” (not just “infrastructure”), Tyson has to demonstrate that changes in federal spending (not Fed policy) explain why the economy appeared to be recovering in late 2009 but faltering by the second quarter of 2010. It is not enough to allude to simulations from Mark Zandi’s famously incorrect forecasting model, as the CEA and CBO have done. Tyson needs to show us a fact or two. She didn’t even try. She even got the size of Obama’s stimulus bill wrong, citing last year’s antiquated $787 billion figure that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has revised twice since January.

In reality, the 2009 stimulus bill was mostly about extending unemployment benefits, expanding Medicaid, dispensing small checks (refundable tax credits) and other schemes to rob Peter and pay Paul. Such transfer payments add nothing to GDP; they just discourage work. The increase in federal nondefense purchases (such as ”shovel-ready” projects) contributed only two-tenths of one percent (0.2) to the change in GDP in 2009. That was no larger than in 2008 when the Recovery Act did not exist. And even that trivial sum is merely an accounting gain rather than a net economic gain, because federal borrowing is no free lunch. The reason Keynesian accounting is no substitute for economics is that governments can only spend what Danny DeVito called “OPM” (other peoples’ money). To claim that such spending is a net addition to “aggregate demand” is to ignore those other people — namely, current and future taxpayers.

The timing of Obama’s so-called stimulus spending has been totally inconsistent with Tyson’s description of how the economy supposedly responded in the past and present, and why she expects growth to slow by a percentage point or two next year unless the feds spend more on multi-year jobless benefits and deficit-sharing with the states. In its latest whitewash, the CBO “now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to $814 billion. Close to half of that impact is estimated to occur in fiscal year 2010, and about 70 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact will have been realized by the close of that fiscal year.” With half of the spending in fiscal 2010 and 30 percent in 2011 and beyond, that means just 20 percent of the $814 billion ($163 billion) had been spent by the end of October 2009. Yet it was in late 2009 when Tyson claims the stimulus had the most impact.

Tyson worries that “by next year, the [fiscal] stimulus will end.” That’s wrong too. The CBO estimates that 30 percent of the spending ($244 billion) will occur in fiscal 2011 (January to October) and beyond to 2019.

Unfortunately, Ms. Tyson’s reference to the second quarter’s GDP is entirely unrelated to her diagnosis of the problem as being “a collapse in private demand.” GDP does not measure private demand because it subtracts imports. Yet spending on imports is just as much a part of “demand” as is spending on domestic goods and services. Real gross domestic purchases increased at a 4.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter, up from 3.9 percent in the first. Neither figure suggests any paucity of private spending.

The second quarter surge in imports (which largely accounts for the wide gap between domestic purchases and GDP) looks like a statistical fluke. “Real” imports appeared to rise so much mainly because import prices supposedly fell at a 9.5 percent annual rate (which means a 2.38 percent rise in the quarter, multiplied by four to get the annual rate). By contrast, import prices rose at a 14.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter and at a 24.8 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. Those figures say more about the folly of converting smallish price changes into annual rates than they do about the real economy. Besides, imports fell 2.1 percent in July and exports rose 1.8%, so the questionable second quarter trade figures did not indicate a lasting trend.

Tyson did not bother to figure out how large the first stimulus bill was, or when the borrowed loot was spent. She did not bother to look up the negligible contribution of federal spending to recent changes in GDP, and she confused GDP with domestic demand.

The press kept telling us that Tyson was almost certain to replace Peter Orszag as OMB director, and then to replace Christina Romer as head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Yet such plums keep slipping from her fingers, to the dismay of her fans at The Nation, NPR and The Atlantic. This is rare evidence of good judgment from the Obama White House.

I suppose I could start with how a news organization that bills itself as “the leading source of nonpartisan reporting” could lend ObamaCare a positive gloss by calling it “reform” – a term that even NPR declines to ascribe to actual legislation (for that reason).

Next, there’s this inane question of whether ObamaCare will spur job growth in the health care sector. With two new health care entitlements and maybe a trillion dollars of new health spending…gosh, d’ya think?

But then there’s the presumption that creating new health care jobs is a good thing. You’d think it would be. After all, unemployment is near 10 percent. But one of our biggest health care problems is that there are too many health care jobs. The Dartmouth Institute’s Elliot Fisher has quipped, “In theory, we could send a third of the U.S. health care workforce to Africa and improve the health of both continents.” ObamaCare will just make this country’s health care sector even more bloated and inefficient.

Wrap your head around all that this summit aims to accomplish. It could give a boost to an unpopular and embattled law by taking one of the law’s biggest liabilities and dressing it up as an asset. It could create a meme that helps turn around President Obama’s low approval rating on the economy – never mind that ObamaCare is stifling the right kind of job creation.

Of course, I may have this summit all wrong. It may give all these issues a fair hearing.

Did I mention the summit’s sponsor is one of the biggest special-interest beneficiaries of ObamaCare? (Tim Carney, call your office.)

A story this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition” reminded me of my continuing complaint that the mainstream (liberal) media regularly put an ideological label on conservative and libertarian organizations and interviewees, but not on liberal and leftist groups. In a report about states accepting stimulus funds, reporter Kathy Lohr quoted “Jon Shure of the Washington D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,” “Maurice Emsellem with the National Employment Law Project,” and “Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the fiscally conservative Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.” (Thanks! And I’d say the label is correct, even if I might prefer libertarian.)

Those are all legitimate sources for the story. But only one of them gets an ideological label – even though the other two groups are clearly on the left. They’re to the left of the Obama administration; indeed, they’re probably part of what the White House press secretary calls the “professional left.” So why not alert listeners that you might be getting a “liberal” or “leftist” perspective from those two sources, just as you warned them that the Cato Institute was speaking from a fiscally conservative perspective?

Back on March 23, I noted but did not blog about references on “Morning Edition” to “the libertarian Cato Institute,” the “conservative American Enterprise Institute,” and “the Brookings Institution.” No label needed for Brookings, of course. Just folks there. (A bit of Googling reveals that the Brookings reference came from Marketplace Radio, heard on WAMU as an insert into “Morning Edition.” But NPR never labels it either.)

NPR’s ombudsman noted in July that NPR uses the term “ultra-conservative” a lot more than “ultra-liberal.”

It’s all too typical of the mainstream-liberal media: They put ideological warning labels on libertarians and conservatives, lest readers and listeners be unaware of the potential for bias, but very rarely label liberals and leftists. Note the absence of labels on NPR in frequent references to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Journalists should be more even-handed: label all your sources ideologically, or none of them. It’s stacking the deck to label those on the right but not those on the left.